LA Gang Members in Syria: Organized Crime, Terrorism ‘Converge’

Two alleged members of a California-based gang claim to be in Syria fighting on support of embattled President Bashar al-Assad.

YouTube

Two Los Angeles gang members appear to have emerged armed and dangerous in the middle of Syria’s civil war, a senior counter-terrorism official confirmed to ABC News, sparking security concerns back on the West Coast.

In a video posted recently on YouTube, a heavily gang-tattooed and camouflaged duo, who call themselves "Creeper" and "Wino," brandish AK-47s while saying that they're "in Syria, gangbangin'.”

Though a version of the video appeared to have been posted online just in recent days, the footage first came to the attention of authorities a month ago, Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief for Counterterrorism Mike Downing told ABC News Sunday.

"My organized crime and gang investigators found it online and on Facebook," Downing said. "We're kind of concerned about their recruitment and whatever other associates they have here... We predicted this would happen -- the [organized crime and terrorism] convergence. What we're worried about is the ones we don't know about here or coming back to the U.S."

Downing said the subjects are gang members, one Armenian and the other Latino, -- not radicalized Islamist jihadis -- fighting with Hezbollah militias to defend the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad, and they are not U.S. citizens. One, if not both, were deported from the U.S. long ago, he added, citing the gangsters’ public social networking posts.

"We’re on the f--king frontline, homie. Front-f--king-line, homie. We don’t give a f--k, dawg," Wino says in the video, between firing rounds from a Kalashnikov rifle through a hole in a partially-destroyed brick wall at unseen "enemigas" purportedly in the distance.

FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have made recent statements that dozens of U.S. persons have fought in Syria and are now under investigation or surveillance back in the homeland, for fear they learned terrorism tradecraft from the dominant jihadi groups there ideologically aligned with al Qaeda. U.S. counterterrorism officials have told ABC News more than 50 have returned to the U.S. with combat experience in Syria.

But since al Qaeda and allied groups are fighting on the side of the rebels in the Syrian conflict, U.S. persons fighting there for Assad to stay in power -- like the two men in the new video -- are rare, sources said. Still, the FBI has opened a counter-terrorism investigation, a source said. FBI officials at the Washington, D.C. field office, which handles cases of U.S. persons fighting in Syria, did not immediately return calls by ABC News for comment.

On Facebook, a self-proclaimed gang member named Wino Ayee Peeyakan, who appears to be the same man as in the YouTube video, has posted dozens of photos from Syria displaying his "APX3" gang tattoos symbolizing the Westside Armenian Power gang and admits he was deported from the U.S. several years ago, leaving behind a child in Los Angeles.

"Man im come back thru Mexico turn my self in do couple of yers and get out [sic]," Peeyakan commented a year ago on a photo of his daughter.